Sarah Beatty is getting real familiar with British Columbia on her current summer tour.
The Hamilton, Ont.-based singer-songwriter has already crossed the American midwest and Alberta, but more than half of her 40 tour stops, including nearly all of July and August, are in B.C.
It’s a busy schedule with sometimes more than one show a day. On Thursday, July 26 Beatty will be at the Parksville Beach Festival during the day, but at night she’ll be at the Nanaimo Bar.
“It’s super interesting to see different parts of B.C. that I’d never seen before,” Beatty said.
Getting to know the land and the people who inhabit it is important to Beatty. She said she thinks of her performances as a kind of cultural sharing; a “show and tell” covering the places she’s been and the stories that came out of those experiences.
Beatty said she expects the intimate confines of the Nanaimo Bar to build a sense of trust between her and her audience, which will rub off on her set. She said it’s a show of faith for spectators to take a chance on an unfamiliar performer and she feels a responsibility make her contribution.
“I try to bring people together and kind of identify the things that connect us all and remind us of how cool we can all be with each other and for each other,” she said.
In Beatty’s eyes, a successful outing is a result of that performer-audience alchemy and the vibe that’s born from their union. Most importantly, it has to feel ‘good.’
“And I say ‘feel good’ in a way if did we feel something, did I feel something? Did the other players on stage feel something? Did the people in the audience feel something?” she explained.
“If we all felt something, then that’s success No. 1. If we all felt something cool happened and that that only could have happened had we all been there at that point in time, those are the special moments I think I’m looking to cultivate in a live performance environment.”
WHAT’S ON … Sarah Beatty performs at the Nanaimo Bar on Thursday, July 26 at 9 p.m. $5 admission.
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